"What you're looking at here is a McLaren F1 LM, parked up in front of the (rather unimaginatively named) Tokyo Metropolitan Government No 1 Building. [...] Charlie has been working on tweaking the lighting values for the cars; here are the fruits of his labour. Pay particular attention to the reflection of the building on the car body, and also the beautiful shimmer of the sun hitting the roof at certain angles.

The car casts shadows on itself, and the road below it. You'll have to ignore the skid marks all over the place... that was me having a bit of fun before we started making the screenshot! Also, check out the specular effects on the tarmac as the sun shimmers off of it. Using the reflections and specular as a guide, you should be able to work out where the sun is in the sky when we made this screenshot!

Finally, you'll notice that the there are actually some advanced camera effects involved here. These have been implemented by Dave to simulate a real-life camera in the game (all adding to the realism we're striving to achieve).

"Motion blur" means that things in the distance are blurred, whilst the stationary car is kept in focus. Also, we make use of a technique called "depth of field". If you pause the animation and rotate to certain angles, you'll see parts of the car are blurred if they are nearer or further away from the camera. This is because the lens is actually focused at the middle of the image, and other things become "out of focus", just like in real-life. These are two really nice effects which we haven't been able to use before, but due to the awesome power of the next generation of hardware we can now implement them in our games."